New York-based The Loadown, a marketing optimization platform for mobile apps, released a new report, Using Version Updates and Price Changes to Improve Mobile App Discovery, showing that, based on U.S. market data collected by The Loadown in 2013, iOS app publishers and developers making version updates and price changes improve their positioning on iTunes’ Top Paid, Top Free and Top Grossing lists.
“When a paid or free app is updated to a new version, the developer can change the name, icon, description, screenshots and keywords of the app as well as force users to notice the new update,” said David Renard, CEO of The Loadown, in a press statement. For price changes, “sales get featured on an Apple RSS feed that is distributed to thousands of sites and Twitter feeds focused on promoting apps that have gone on sale or have recently become free,” he said.
The Loadown’s data (see graph) indicates that free apps making version changes increased the number of days they were ranked by an average of 45 percent in Apple’s Top Free list and 73 percent in Top Grossing (19 more days), compared to apps that never updated their versions. In terms of rank, these free apps improved by about 17 percent in Top Paid and 21 percent in Top Grossing (45 rank positions).
Similarly, compared to apps that never changed their prices and never updated their versions, paid apps that did had an average increase of 36 percent in the number of days they were ranked in Top Paid and 96 percent in Top Grossing (22 more days) along with a 23 percent improvement in their Top Paid rank and 21 percent in Top Grossing (50 rank positions).
The Loadown’s data provides supporting evidence that active involvement by apps in their positioning on Apple’s App Store through version updates and price changes significantly improves their discoverability, downloads and sales.